By
Neya Abdi
June 20, 2024
•
min read
Using the agile methodology to develop your product? These are some of the most popular AI tools that teams are using for each stage of the product lifecycle.
During the Research phase, you’re gathering information about the problem you’re solving and how the market defines it. The Research phase is important, because it helps you build something that your customers actually want. Plus, it helps you understand how your competition is already solving this problem, so you can solve it 10 times better and lure those customers to your own product.
At the research stage, you want to identify:
Looppanel converts your calls into transcripts and pulls out key data insights, saving you the amount of time it would take to mine your interviews. Qualitative research helps you get deeper insights about what motivates customers.
“I found the insights extracted from the user interview really useful, and spot on. It quotes the part that informs the insights, so you can always double check its accuracy. Also I found it really useful that you can upload your interview script, or your user questions, so that AI matches the insights to those questions. That is super helpful for grouping and makes it easier to get to your conclusions.” – Product Hunt Review
Heatseeker helps you run live market tests to identify your audience based on real buyer intent. You develop a digital campaign with variants of your proposed product features or benefits and launch it to the market. After two weeks, Heatseeker’s data science tells you which variant performed the best, so you can build what customers actually want to buy.
“Exciting news! We have been running ads for a week and have seen a decrease in our CPC and an increase in sign-ups. So awesome!” – Genevieve Liston, Cooper, Growth Consultant
During the Planning Stage, you define the timeline, determine which features you want to build based on the audience needs you’ve identified, draft a project plan, and make sure that you have buy-in from stakeholders. The quality of your product’s planning stage is a huge indicator of product development success. Without clear direction, it’s easy for the team to get distracted by potential ideas or demoralized by roadblocks. Sometimes, individual team members can become unclear about what their specific responsibilities are as well.
Creating projects, assigning tasks, updating statuses, or generating progress reports are all painful, time-consuming, but necessary parts of the planning stage. Monday.com uses AI to automate many of the repetitive tasks associated with project management. It also provides integrations with other tools and dashboards that can give you a bird’s-eye view of the status of your projects.
“Monday.com has been an incredible tool for my organization in order to streamline operations between departments. Prior to utilizing Monday.com, large-scale processes that required collaboration from multiple departments were fragmented, and work would slip through the cracks or would require one department to do extra work in order to ensure project completion. Now, progress on projects is more transparent, and automations ensure that different stakeholders or departments are incorporated into a process with less manual work.” – G2
ClickUp is a project management tool that offers several popular AI-powered features. This includes Smart Search, which makes it easy for people to find tasks, comments, and documents. (Everyone knows the frustration of being stalled on a task simply because you can’t find the one tidbit of info you need.) The software also offers workflow automations, task suggestions, and predictive insights for resource allocation and timeline setting.
“ClickUp has been a great product to work with so far. The interface is visually appealing and easy to interact with. The platform integrates with so many other products and offers a variety of both AI and automated task services. I couldn't be happier with our choice.” – Gartner User Reviews
During the Building stage of the product lifecycle, you are building (developing) your product, testing it (either in-house or with users), and managing its overall development.
Tabnine is an AI coding assistant that helps teams auto-generate code and speed up the software development lifecycle. It makes personalized, context-aware suggestions and can support bespoke models that are trained on a team’s codebase.
"Best Free Alternative to Github Co Pilot. It's free, and the code suggestions for a free variant are really good. Simple and really easy for daily usage.” – G2
Testsigma is an AI-powered test automation tool that supports functional testing, cross-browser testing, visual testing, continuous testing, and regression testing. It offers extensive integration capabilities, hooking up to tools such as Jira, GitHub, and Jenkins, which makes it easier to include in development workflows.
“I have been able to make hundreds of tests which are specific to user acceptance criteria yet flexible enough to handle general build-acceptance testing.” – Capterra
Next up is the Release Phase. There are three options for the outcome of this phase: release the product to the public, release it to a private group of beta users or test users, or hold off on sharing the release until you’re a few more sprints into your product’s development. If you choose the first route and want to execute on your go-to-market strategy, here are a few tools that can help.
Jasper can help you with copywriting. Of course, you’ll need a writer to look things over and make sure you’re hitting your key go-to-market messages, but Jasper can help you overcome the fearsome blank page. It can help you speed up the process of producing social media copy, write blog articles, and turn blog articles into video scripts as well.
“Jasper has helped me cut my content production time in half. It is excellent for writing outlines to help you jumpstart a blog post, or helping with an introduction or conclusion paragraph. One of my favorite features if you can set the tone of voice, so this AI software can write in my voice.” – Capterra Review
This wouldn’t be a list about AI tools for product development without Canva. Canva’s AI features can help you incorporate your brand colours, generate custom images, and integrate other AI-powered apps using the Canva Apps Marketplace.
“I have been using Canva for a few years now. It is easy to use and fun to use too! The customer support is fantastic. The paid version is great. I use it almost everyday for my design projects. It is easy for importing data such as images, videos from other softwares as well through google drive. They have ready to use templates which makes the design process easy and saves a lot of time!” – G2 Review
At this stage, you can evaluate how your customers are using your product, what features they like, and what enhancements they’re interested in seeing in future releases.
Amplitude allows you to track and analyze user behaviour. These insights then inform future iterations of your product as well as marketing and customer engagement initiatives. AI supports Amplitude’s ability to predict user behaviour and outcomes.
"It is a tool that's user friendly and allows you to personalize a lot the data you want to get and extract. The analytics results you get are really good, and the visualization as well is great." – Software Advice
AI is making it easier than ever to turn ideas into commercial products. Still, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what the market actually needs, so all of your tools are contributing to a needed, marketable product. If you need help finding your target audience, or validating whether there’s a willing customer base for your idea, try Heatseeker free for 30 days, so you can run your live market test.
Using the agile methodology to develop your product? These are some of the most popular AI tools that teams are using for each stage of the product lifecycle.
During the Research phase, you’re gathering information about the problem you’re solving and how the market defines it. The Research phase is important, because it helps you build something that your customers actually want. Plus, it helps you understand how your competition is already solving this problem, so you can solve it 10 times better and lure those customers to your own product.
At the research stage, you want to identify:
Looppanel converts your calls into transcripts and pulls out key data insights, saving you the amount of time it would take to mine your interviews. Qualitative research helps you get deeper insights about what motivates customers.
“I found the insights extracted from the user interview really useful, and spot on. It quotes the part that informs the insights, so you can always double check its accuracy. Also I found it really useful that you can upload your interview script, or your user questions, so that AI matches the insights to those questions. That is super helpful for grouping and makes it easier to get to your conclusions.” – Product Hunt Review
Heatseeker helps you run live market tests to identify your audience based on real buyer intent. You develop a digital campaign with variants of your proposed product features or benefits and launch it to the market. After two weeks, Heatseeker’s data science tells you which variant performed the best, so you can build what customers actually want to buy.
“Exciting news! We have been running ads for a week and have seen a decrease in our CPC and an increase in sign-ups. So awesome!” – Genevieve Liston, Cooper, Growth Consultant
During the Planning Stage, you define the timeline, determine which features you want to build based on the audience needs you’ve identified, draft a project plan, and make sure that you have buy-in from stakeholders. The quality of your product’s planning stage is a huge indicator of product development success. Without clear direction, it’s easy for the team to get distracted by potential ideas or demoralized by roadblocks. Sometimes, individual team members can become unclear about what their specific responsibilities are as well.
Creating projects, assigning tasks, updating statuses, or generating progress reports are all painful, time-consuming, but necessary parts of the planning stage. Monday.com uses AI to automate many of the repetitive tasks associated with project management. It also provides integrations with other tools and dashboards that can give you a bird’s-eye view of the status of your projects.
“Monday.com has been an incredible tool for my organization in order to streamline operations between departments. Prior to utilizing Monday.com, large-scale processes that required collaboration from multiple departments were fragmented, and work would slip through the cracks or would require one department to do extra work in order to ensure project completion. Now, progress on projects is more transparent, and automations ensure that different stakeholders or departments are incorporated into a process with less manual work.” – G2
ClickUp is a project management tool that offers several popular AI-powered features. This includes Smart Search, which makes it easy for people to find tasks, comments, and documents. (Everyone knows the frustration of being stalled on a task simply because you can’t find the one tidbit of info you need.) The software also offers workflow automations, task suggestions, and predictive insights for resource allocation and timeline setting.
“ClickUp has been a great product to work with so far. The interface is visually appealing and easy to interact with. The platform integrates with so many other products and offers a variety of both AI and automated task services. I couldn't be happier with our choice.” – Gartner User Reviews
During the Building stage of the product lifecycle, you are building (developing) your product, testing it (either in-house or with users), and managing its overall development.
Tabnine is an AI coding assistant that helps teams auto-generate code and speed up the software development lifecycle. It makes personalized, context-aware suggestions and can support bespoke models that are trained on a team’s codebase.
"Best Free Alternative to Github Co Pilot. It's free, and the code suggestions for a free variant are really good. Simple and really easy for daily usage.” – G2
Testsigma is an AI-powered test automation tool that supports functional testing, cross-browser testing, visual testing, continuous testing, and regression testing. It offers extensive integration capabilities, hooking up to tools such as Jira, GitHub, and Jenkins, which makes it easier to include in development workflows.
“I have been able to make hundreds of tests which are specific to user acceptance criteria yet flexible enough to handle general build-acceptance testing.” – Capterra
Next up is the Release Phase. There are three options for the outcome of this phase: release the product to the public, release it to a private group of beta users or test users, or hold off on sharing the release until you’re a few more sprints into your product’s development. If you choose the first route and want to execute on your go-to-market strategy, here are a few tools that can help.
Jasper can help you with copywriting. Of course, you’ll need a writer to look things over and make sure you’re hitting your key go-to-market messages, but Jasper can help you overcome the fearsome blank page. It can help you speed up the process of producing social media copy, write blog articles, and turn blog articles into video scripts as well.
“Jasper has helped me cut my content production time in half. It is excellent for writing outlines to help you jumpstart a blog post, or helping with an introduction or conclusion paragraph. One of my favorite features if you can set the tone of voice, so this AI software can write in my voice.” – Capterra Review
This wouldn’t be a list about AI tools for product development without Canva. Canva’s AI features can help you incorporate your brand colours, generate custom images, and integrate other AI-powered apps using the Canva Apps Marketplace.
“I have been using Canva for a few years now. It is easy to use and fun to use too! The customer support is fantastic. The paid version is great. I use it almost everyday for my design projects. It is easy for importing data such as images, videos from other softwares as well through google drive. They have ready to use templates which makes the design process easy and saves a lot of time!” – G2 Review
At this stage, you can evaluate how your customers are using your product, what features they like, and what enhancements they’re interested in seeing in future releases.
Amplitude allows you to track and analyze user behaviour. These insights then inform future iterations of your product as well as marketing and customer engagement initiatives. AI supports Amplitude’s ability to predict user behaviour and outcomes.
"It is a tool that's user friendly and allows you to personalize a lot the data you want to get and extract. The analytics results you get are really good, and the visualization as well is great." – Software Advice
AI is making it easier than ever to turn ideas into commercial products. Still, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what the market actually needs, so all of your tools are contributing to a needed, marketable product. If you need help finding your target audience, or validating whether there’s a willing customer base for your idea, try Heatseeker free for 30 days, so you can run your live market test.